Weird Western Tales

Since tomorrow is Hallowe'en, it seems appropriate to take a look at the long-standing tradition of mixing horror with the Western, producing the so-called Weird Western. This is a subgenre that cuts across all formats, from pulp fiction and paperbacks to movies, TV, and video games.

Robert E. Howard created the Weird Western during the 1930s with several stories published, appropriately enough, in the pulp magazine WEIRD TALES. Howard combined the supernatural with the traditional Western in such yarns as "The Man on the Ground", "The Horror From the Mound", and "Old Garfield's Heart". His story "The Dead Remember", published in ARGOSY, is a stylistically daring ghost story unlike anything else being done in the pulps at that time. All of these stories are available in the massive, soon-to-be-published collection ROBERT E. HOWARD'S WESTERN TALES, for which I provided the introduction.

As usual, Howard was ahead of his time, and Weird Westerns continued to be rare during the Forties. Every now and then an author would introduce a seemingly supernatural element in a Western story, such as the Masked Rider novel "The Trail of the Blue Snake" by Gunnison Steele (the pseudonym of Bennie Gardner), but these stories invariably fell back on the "Scooby-Doo" ending, where all the mysterious happenings turn out to have logical explanations.

During the Fifties, however, some genuine Weird Westerns began to appear again, most notably a long-running series by Lon Williams in the pulp REAL WESTERN which featured as its hero a deputy marshal named Lee Winters. In the course of his duties, Winters ran up against witches, ghouls, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures, and although occasionally they were explained away, for the most part the reader is left with the impression that these occult menaces were real. Many of the Lee Winters stories can be read on-line for free at www.pulpgen.com.

It was during the Fifties, of course, that movies such as JESSIE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER, BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA, and CURSE OF THE UNDEAD began to appear. These were low-budget projects shot on a very tight schedule and their quality shows that, but they're definitely horror Westerns. Similar plots were used in Western TV series from time to time, as Cheyenne went after a Bigfoot-like creature or a monster stalked the alleys of Dodge City . . . but invariably the writers of these episodes resorted to the old Scooby-Doo ending again.

Another area in which the Weird Western has, if not thrived, at least been used fairly often is the Western paperback series. The most iconic example is the SPECTROS series, a series of four (or possibly five, there's some debate about that) novels by Logan Winters, a pseudonym of the prolific author Paul Joseph Lederer. SPECTROS is a flat-out supernatural series centered around a sorcerer/gunfighter who encounters all sorts of occult menaces in his travels. The house-name books have featured supernatural plots as well, including werewolves (SLOCUM AND THE WOLF HUNT and LONE STAR AND THE KANSAS WOLVES), mysterious creatures (the Gunsmith novel SASQUATCH HUNT and my Trailsman novel HIGH COUNTRY HORROR), zombies (LONGARM AND THE VOODOO QUEEN, by yours truly writing as Tabor Evans), and demons from another realm (LONGARM AND THE DEVIL'SBRIDE by, yes, me). I'm sure there are many, many other examples among the house-name Westerns that I'm not aware of, and if some of you who have read (or written) them want to mention them in the comments, that would be more than welcome.

Other notable novels that feature both horror and Western elements are FEVRE DREAM by George R.R. Martin (yes, the "Game of Thrones" guy, and while this is more of a historical novel, it has riverboats in it and that almost makes it a Western), MOON DANCE by Somtow Sucharitkal, and recently DUST OF THE DAMNED by Western Fictioneers' own Peter Brandvold, which features a ghoul hunter instead of a bounty hunter. C.L. Werner's trilogy BLOOD MONEY,BLOOD & STEEL, and BLOOD OF THE DRAGON, while set in the Warhammer epic fantasy universe, features a bounty hunter named Brunner and the novels are very much Western-influenced.

Then there's a volume near and dear to the hearts of many of us, SIX-GUNS AND SLAY BELLS, the Western Fictioneers Christmas/paranormal anthology, which features a number of stories that can only be called Weird Westerns. Vampires, ghosts, possessed toys, aliens, Sasquatch . . . these yarns are prime examples of the subgenre.

A number of Weird Westerns have been published as comic books, too. There was even a comic book called WEIRD WESTERN TALES from which I've swiped the title of this blog post. It was the home of bounty hunter Jonah Hex (funny how so many of the entries in this subgenre seem to feature bounty hunters) as well as El Diablo, a series about a mild-mannered bank clerk possessed by a gunfighting spirit of vengeance. The original Ghost Rider (not the guy on the motorcycle with the flaming skull) wasn't supernatural, but many of the stories featured eerie elements. Joe R. Lansdale's two Jonah Hex mini-series "Two-Gun Mojo" and "Riders of the Worm and Such" are definitely horror Westerns. Lansdale is also the author of the novel DEAD IN THE WEST, quite possibly the first novel to combine the Western with a zombie apocalypse, long before zombie apocalypses were cool. Even the popular video game RED DEAD REDEMPTION features supernatural elements, as does the role-playing game DEADLANDS.

This just scratches the surface of the Weird Western, but I hope I've intrigued a few of you enough that you'll try some of the novels and stories I've mentioned. If you have some favorites I hope you'll share them with us in the comments. There are numerous blogs and websites devoted to the subject where you can find out much, much more about Weird Westerns if you're interested. I know there are some Western readers, and probably writers and editors, who are very opposed to including anything fantastical in Westerns. For me, though, it just broadens the field and provides more opportunities for me to be entertained. In the meantime, watch out tomorrow night for any trick-or-treaters dressed as buckaroos.

There might be something . . . weird . . . lurking under those cowboy hats.